Reaching out to the world with sport for development
Sara Nicholls is passionate about the power of sport as a catalyst for development. That passion has taken her from sports-for-development work in Africa to participation in a groundbreaking United Nations youth leadership summit on sport for development and peace in New York City.
Nicholls, who completed her master’s in human kinetics with a collaborative program in women’s studies in the fall of 2008, focuses her research on better understanding how female peer educators contribute to the global progress of the sport-for-development approach.
Her experience in sport for development began in 2002 with a Commonwealth Games Canada (CGC) internship in Lusaka, Zambia, where she collaborated with Kicking AIDS Out, an international network that uses peer education and sport to promote life skills and raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. Later, as CGC’s senior Africa regional officer, she supported local programs in health education, leadership and gender inclusion in ten African nations.
Nicholls says she chose the University of Ottawa for its unique collaborative program in women’s studies at the master’s level, which allowed her to combine her hands-on sport-for-development experience with high-quality feminist theory and methodology.
The importance of Nicholls’ work was recently recognized by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which provided funding allowing her to study the potential of sport for building HIV/AIDS awareness among Aboriginal youth and women through the experiences of female African peer educators.
"My challenge is to connect my knowledge and experience to help influence the ‘big picture’ of sport for development," says Nicholls.
By Greg Higgins
Published: July 2010